IDL language

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 08.05.09 12:34, David Zeuthen (david at fubar.dk) wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 18:32 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > Please elaborate a bit on this! Why shouldn't the current language be
> > used as IDL?
> 
> Because it's XML?

I am not sure if that's convincing. If all this is about is dislike of
XML then uh, it's just a matter of taste. Not sure if a matter of
taste is reason enough to kill XML and replace IDL in D-Bus.

I don't particularly like XML either, but let's stay reasonable. It
also has a lot of advantages: everyone knows how to parse it. There is
a huge set of ready-made tools available for it, emacs modes, syntax
verifiers, editors, processors ... It is easily extensible, both
officially and for in-house projects. We have XSLT/CSS which can make
it very readable in a browser. It has a lot of mindshare. And the list
goes on and on and on.

Also, introducing a second language would create a lot of
redundancies: the introspection XML cannot go away so we'd have to
maintain everything twice.

And then, the experiences with IDLs haven been that good either
IIRC.

If D-Bus was new and not yet as widely used adopting a different
language than XML could have been a good idea. But now?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4